We realize that the vision of the Internet Of Things, and specifically the implications of a spime-based technological future, will take time to fully emerge. The investment that we are making to analyze and understand the details of this vision underscore the solidity of our approach, and our desire to make sure that WideTag, and its projects can develop in a healthy and constructive manner.

Internet Of Things

What is the Internet Of Things, and why do we think that it is a necessary next development of the Internet itself?

The progressive realization of Moore’s Law’s self-fulfilling prophecy by armies of engineers belonging to competing groups all over the planet brought us an ever larger number of computing devices. From mainframes, thought to suffice in a handful of exemplars, to minicomputers, in thousands, to personal computers in millions and hundreds of millions, we are now in the middle of the migration to a new platform of mobile communications based on billions of devices.

This tendency is not about to ground to a halt, and with the further miniaturization of components, and integration of features, we are arriving to the point where truly ubiquitous computing will make computing disappear into our environment. Network addressability will become a given for any object: this is going to be the Internet Of Things.

We have learned through these cycles how costly is the mindless race to establish mutually incompatible approaches which waste resources, and goodwill from a market hesitant to run the risk of adopting the wrong player’s solutions. Today it is understood fairly universally that only an open and non-proprietary approach can represent the inclusive solution that can collaboratively evolve towards the best implementation for the fulfillment of a given technology’s vision. OpenSpime is such an open, and inclusive approach!

Spimes

What are spimes? The word ’spime’ is a neologism invented and made popular by author, columnist, and speaker Bruce Sterling in his book ‘Making Things’, and it represents a new category of objects.

According to the restricted definition adopted by OpenSpime, an object is a spime if it has:

• a GPS unit, or other location-aware technologies to know where it is, and when it is
• communcation capabilities with the Internet, directly, or through gateways
• memory for storing its data until it can communicate
• a sensor, to measure a value about the world around it.

Most mobile phones today, for example are spimes, and similarly, most of the car-navigation units are not spimes, as they have no sensor to perceive the physical world.

Starting to categorize the various classes of spimes, we tend to call an object sharing similar characteristics with car navigation systems of today Category 0 Spime, while we tend to call one which has a sensor measuring the value of a parameter in the world around it Category 1 Spime.